Mike Sassak
Developer at Shopify
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMike Sassak is a seasoned developer with 16 years of experience building reliable full-stack web systems, currently contributing at Shopify from Austin. He blends object-oriented and functional programming with design-for-testability practices, specializing in Ruby on Rails, HTTP/REST APIs, and large-scale automation. His open-source work includes significant test-driven contributions to the Cucumber ecosystem—adding parser features and interactive CLI testing capabilities—highlighting a strong focus on robust tooling and test automation. With a career spanning startups to major tech companies like Apple and Rackspace, he brings pragmatic engineering and deep experience shipping production software. A History BA by training, he pairs a curious, analytical mindset with hands-on engineering craft.
17 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
BA, History, BA, History at University of Michigan-Dearborn
Github Skills (8)
testing10
gherkin10
cucumber10
shell10
bdd10
test-automation10
ruby10
parser9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
cucumber-attic/gherkin2
Sep 2009 - Nov 2010
A fast Gherkin parser in Ragel (The parser behind Cucumber)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:313 commits in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Mike contributed to the Gherkin parser by implementing table parsing functionality. The code changes involved the development of a simple table parser and refactoring of the state machine to accommodate it. Furthermore, the user added and modified specifications for the table parsing feature, demonstrating a focus on test-driven development and code validation within the project's domain of parsing Gherkin language.
cucumbergherkinparserragel
cucumber/aruba
Sep 2010 - Mar 2011
Test command-line applications with Cucumber-Ruby, RSpec or Minitest.
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:72 commits in 6 months
Contributions summary:Mike primarily focused on enhancing the testing capabilities of the `aruba` project, a tool for testing command-line applications. Their commits introduce and refine features related to interactive session testing, including the ability to start, interact with, and analyze the output of interactive processes within tests. This work involved adding new test steps, modifying existing ones, and refactoring the underlying code to support these interactive testing scenarios. The contributions significantly expanded the project's ability to test complex command-line applications.
command-linecucumberminitestrspecruby
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